In April, the unemployment rate in the Rockford metropolitan area dipped below 10 percent for the first time in 64 months. For Rockford to transform itself by 2025 into a community that gets listed by national magazines as one of the best places to live, not one of the worst, it needs lots of new jobs.

“If we wanted to get back to even an average per-capita income, the numbers are pretty staggering; 30,000 jobs at $75,000 a year,” said Mark Podemski, the vice president for development of the Rockford Area Economic Development Council. “It’s a big number. We need to get a dose of reality.”

That means not waiting for a savior.

“It’s not what type of jobs do you want to attract but what types of opportunities do we want to create,” Mayor Larry Morrissey said. “The mythology of economic development is throwing cheese around and attracting industrial mice, with the idea that a handful of employers look at the world as a Monopoly game, and they have the power to create jobs.

“That approach has taken hold over the past 75 years. I don’t know if in reality that’s the way it’s ever worked, but I definitely don’t think that’s the way it’s going to be. It has to be more about developing opportunities for the people who are already here. Doing so will also make us attractive for employers who are looking to relocate a factory or retail jobs.”

Morrissey wants Rockford to create its own jobs, even if they are not glamorous.

“We’re creating opportunities to start small instead of getting in that arms race and competing with other cities for employers. We don’t want to get in a situation where we’re begging people to come in from the outside,” he said.

Woodward is adding about 1,500 jobs with its new Rock Cut Campus in Loves Park. That is an example of one of the best ways for Rockford to add jobs.

“Seventy percent of expansion happens from existing employers,” Podemski said. “If you want to be prosperous, you need to help your employers grow and expand.”

One way to do that is provide a qualified workforce.

Page 2 of 4 - “We’re working on becoming a learning community from cradle to grave,” Morrissey said.

Education

Junior colleges are helping out, with Rock Valley and Highland Community offering credits for apprentice workers in the building trades. RVC also reached an agreement with Northern Illinois University recently in which students who transfer from RVC to NIU but don’t finish four-year degrees can get two-year associate degrees.

Those degrees can help local students get good-paying union jobs in welding, plumbing, and heating, ventilation and air conditioning. But education, especially in math, is essential even in the building trades.

Some secondary education is essential for many manufacturing jobs, too.

“You need skills with modern manufacturing,” RVC President Mike Mastroianni said. “It’s not like the days of old. You have to have your people trained. Woodward took a big risk. That’s what a lot of us are trying to do now, making sure Woodward’s workforce skill needs are met.”

Rockford’s workforce has the skills sought by call centers. Rockford has added 3,000 such jobs in the past five years, and the area is ideally suited to add technical call centers.

“Once you have a critical mass of call center personnel, you become more attractive to technical call centers, for the people who help you through flat-screen TV setups. That provides higher pay as well,” Podemski said. “Those types of jobs have come back from overseas.

“We have a good metric for that. Call centers like the idea of some education, but not too much. They like the idea of promoting from within so they can bring people along, and we have an above-average level of some college without completed degrees.”

Job expansion

Rockford is also ideally situated to expand in the food-service sector.

“We have a lot of water and we have a lot of sewer capacity. Those are the key things along with the workforce that you need for food service,” Podemski said. “Our location also helps. Look at our cross-section of interstate highways to the north, south, east and west and proximity to Chicago. We don’t have to sit within the congestion of Chicago, but we can serve it very well.”

As for attracting other outside jobs, Podemski and Morrissey said the best way is not to bring in dream jobs from the outside but to provide for those already here.

Page 3 of 4 - “It’s not about what are the jobs we wish we had, but what are the jobs we’re qualified for,” Podemski said. “If we wish for other jobs, we have to prepare our community to qualify for those jobs. The jobs that pay significantly higher require higher levels of education. Why can’t we get more of those jobs? Well, if we had more engineers and more people with four-year education degrees, we would get more of those jobs. It’s a chicken-and-egg thing.

“We just can’t wish we had better-paying jobs if we don’t have qualifying people in the workforce who meet those jobs. IBM went to Dubuque. We didn’t even know they were looking because they eliminated us before we even knew we had a chance. That’s why it’s important to put our best face forward. The only way to do that is increase our demographics by increasing our graduation level and reducing crime.”

Being competitive

Morrissey wants Rockford to be competitive “in the highest-tech jobs,” but the way to get there is by starting out with the lowest-tech jobs.

“We have to understand we have folks with much less-sophisticated job skills who also need job opportunities,” he said.

The city has set up a prisoner re-entry program with the local trade unions to help ex-offenders get jobs. Morrissey is also working with the Rockford Housing Authority to push an Etsy initiative, teaching Rockfordians about the e-commerce platform that helps them sell homemade jewelry, furniture and art.

He says Rockford needs more educated workers but can’t forget about the ones without an education.

“We absolutely have to attract high-end employers, but our poverty numbers are so out of whack we’re not going to compete in that. We have people with much-less sophisticated job skills who don’t have a high school diploma and don’t have a GED who also need jobs. We can’t say, ‘You have to wait until you get an associate’s degree to work, and that may be 10 years off because you can barely read.’ That’s setting ourselves up for failure. It’s not working here. It’s not working anywhere else in the country.”

So Morrissey doesn’t want only those 30,000 jobs that pay $75,000 a year that Podemski talked about. He wants thousands of smaller jobs for less-educated workers, which would reduce crime and poverty.

“If we address their needs, ironically, it would make us more attractive to more high-end employers,” Morrissey said.

Page 4 of 4 - Community touch

He points to the City Market, which sells locally grown food in downtown Rockford, and talks about people forming organic farming co-ops and homemade artisan furniture co-ops.

“We can come back full circle to where we were well over 100 years ago when the community was founded,” Morrissey said.

Government subsidy programs make it harder to grow vegetables locally. More than 90 percent of the $20 billion the government pays farmers every year is tied to wheat, corn, soybeans, rice and cotton. Farmers who receive a subsidy for one of those five crops will lose their subsidy if they rent their land to someone who plants something different.

“Our federal government has done way too much to pick favorites in the marketplace,” Morrissey said, “and in the process put the squeeze on the small players to the detriment of our nation. Ninety percent of agricultural land in Illinois is for nondirect human consumption. But (growing vegetables) is being done anyway. The trends out there are unbelievable with the growth in microfarming.

“We’re just beginning to scratch the surface. You see it in the popularity of City Market. You see it when Walmart and Target are moving to organic-food purchases.

“There are opportunities to start making it happen, even despite some of the financial burdens. You buy a plot of land and start making a living, even if it’s not your sole income. You go into craft entrepreneurship. Go into microbrewing or community-supported agriculture.

“The transformation of our community is starting at the very basic level, not with the loud gong of one employer saving us. That myth of a grand slam saving us has been laid to rest. If we truly want to transform the community, we have to tap into what we have, not what we wish we had.”